Page 80 of Installment Immortality

“You can tell whose emotions belong to who?”

“Yeah. I’ve always been better at that than you were, whichever version of ‘you’ is living in my brother. I’m guessing it’s biological.You got stronger pheromones than I did, I read emotions more clearly.”

Arthur made a face. “That doesn’t seem entirely fair.”

“Seems fine to me.”

“Youwouldthink so. You’re the one who got the good part!”

“Try saying that when you’re trying out for the spring musical with fifty other teenage sopranos who believe their entire lives will be defined by how successful they are in high school.” She pushed herself to her feet and moved toward the nearest assortment of jars, reaching out to touch one. Then she recoiled, sending the jar rocking with the force of her withdrawal. “Augh!”

“Elsie? What’s wrong?”

“It felt… wrong. Like sticking my arm into a puddle of frozen slush and warm vomit. Both things at the same time. It shouldn’t have been possible, but it was, and ithurt.” She gave the jar a mistrustful look. “I don’t think that’s where the feeling was coming from.”

“So what do we do, just touch every single jar in this room? There must be dozens.”

Carefully,I thought.If you have to do it this way, do it carefully.

Elsie and Arthur exchanged a look and nodded, almost in unison. It was the closest to seeing Artie again that I had come since Sarah dragged his hollow husk home from her cross-dimensional adventures.

Together, they rose, and began moving to touch the various jars, shuddering each time, moving away from outcomes that weren’t correct but at least weren’t upsetting enough to make them knock something over. And I sat in the bottom of my own jar, and tried to think about the things that would make my emotions ring out over the rest of the room, the things that would tell them to come forme.

It was tempting to go back to the sore spots the spirit jar hadripped open in my memories, the places where I was unsettled and leaking ectoplasm into the air around me. They were raw, they were agonizing, and they wereright thereto be exploited. But they were all terrible things, moments when I’d been so ground down that I thought I might die, moments where hope had been little more than a lie. All these shattered, shredded spirits were capable of that kind of suffering. I wasn’t special.

What I was was still coherent enough to focus my mind where I wanted it, and right now, I wanted to project emotions that would help me stand out from the rest of the unquiet dead. I thought back almost to the beginning of my afterlife, to the moment when my family’s phone rang and I’d answered it to find an exhausted Frances Healy on the other end. She’d been looking for someone to take care of her little girl, and I’d agreed on the spot. The town hadn’t known that I was dead yet—technically, Buckley never did know, since we’d buried my father while I played at being among the living, and then I’d simply drifted away rather than staging a funeral of my own—and my flyers advertising babysitting services had still been posted at the library.

I didn’t know when Fran called that taking the job would mean shifting myself into a whole new kind of haunting. If I had, the crossroads would never have allowed it. But it did, and they did, and now here I was, doing my best to mentally scream the hope and joy that had come from that simple call.

When neither Elsie nor Arthur looked in my direction, I shifted my thoughts forward to the day Alice had called me to the porch of the Old Parrish Place, exhausted and wreathed in bandages like she was trying to emulate a mummy. “Mary,” she’d said, “guess Thomas loves me after all, because he says I can stay, and I think I’m going to do it. Can you haunt me here?”

It had been such a little question, and it had carried an entire future on its shoulders. I’d long since given up hope that Alice would fall in love with anyone else, and she wasn’t the sort ofgirl who went out and had children with strangers for the sake of having had them. She’d embraced me on that porch, and I’d held her in return, and I’d known that it was all going to be all right. The world was going to keep moving forward, and I’d be able to move with it, and life would go on. That was all I’d wanted. For life to go on, and let me keep haunting it as it unfolded.

I hopscotched from happy moment to happy moment. Jane’s birth, Jane’s wedding, and then, bright as a new star, Elsinore, first child of her generation, family to me before she ever drew breath. Alex and Artie and Verity and Annie, and then Sarah, bright bauble fished out of a storm drain, adopted but no less dear for any of that. School plays and school pictures, Alex’s first SCA meeting, Annie’s first cheerleading practice, Verity leaving us to go on television and dance for the world…

Thomas, coming home at last, and Alice promising me that they were finally back to stay.

Elsie stopped where she was, turning her head and looking directly at my jar. Then she started toward me.

Yes, yes, yes!I thought.Goodgirl,Elsie.

“What did you pick up on?” asked Arthur.

“Spike of joy from one of these jars over here,” she said. “I think I may have found Mary. If not Mary, then a ghost that’s still coherent enough to be happy at the prospect of being found, and right now, that’s good enough for me.”

“If you can’t be sure, I don’t think that’s a good ide—” he began, and stopped as Mary picked up a jar two away from my own and began to loosen the top.

She hadn’t finished unscrewing it when the attic door swung open and Nathaniel appeared, a small pistol in his hands and a grim expression on his face. “Put your hands up and put that down,” he said, sternly.

Elsie raised her hands in the universal gesture of surrender, letting go of the jar at the same time. Nathaniel realized whatwas about to happen and shouted, firing a single round before he slammed the attic door.

As moments went, it was so like the moment when his brother shot Jane that the world seemed to stop, everything going grayscale and slow. The bullet caught Elsie in the shoulder, jerking her back and spinning her halfway around. She grunted. Arthur howled, diving for his sister.

And the jar hit the floor.

It didn’t shatter on impact so much as it exploded, shards flying everywhere. A gray mist rose from the broken bits of glass and assorted debris where the jar had been, starting to laugh a horrible, distorted laugh. I stood and rushed for the wall of my own jar, intending to at least attempt to reason with the emerging spirit, but as before, no matter how hard I ran, I didn’t get anywhere. I was trapped on a treadmill in my own private hell, with no way to move backward or forward.

The mist rose higher and higher, and then, without any warning of what it was about to do, pulled together into a thin column of smoke-dark air and drove itself at Arthur. Being a smart boy who remembered everything about dealing with ghosts that had been known by anyone in his hospital room when he was constructed, he clamped his mouth shut and turned his face away.

---